Hello!
I created two files

1) # dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.image bs=1M seek=30000 count=1
2) # truncate -s 30G disk.image1

# ls -lh disk*
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 30G Oct 26 14:27 disk.image
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 30G Oct 26 14:27 disk.image1

# du -h disk*
1.0M disk.image
0 disk.image1

Why is shows that size of disk* files is 30 MB but du shows other value?

The first command actually writes a single block (count = 1) of size 1 Mb and skip 30000 blocks of the same size, that is 30 Gb. In practice it allocates 30.001 Gb on the filesystem, but the actual disk space used is only 1 Mb. The result is a sparse file.

The second command creates an empty file, as stated in the man page of truncate:
In this case the original size was 0 bytes (since it was a non existent file) and being shorter than 30 Gb the extended part is 0 bytes long. The difference is between the ls and du commands: the former reads the information in the inode, therefore it reports the allocated space; the latter reports the actual physical space used. If you use the option --apparent-size of the du command, you should see 30 Gb as reported by ls.

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